Leadership Before Infrastructure: Capacity Development and Public Library Governance under Decentralization in Kediri Regency, Indonesia

Abstract

Public libraries are now asked to deliver digital inclusion, lifelong learning, and community empowerment, yet research on their transformation still treats capacity as a matter of buildings, collections, and technology, and rarely as a governance process inside decentralized states. This article examines how capacity development shapes the transformation of public library governance in Kediri Regency, Indonesia, and why that transformation proceeds unevenly across library types. We conducted a qualitative case study drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 key informants (government officials, librarians, village heads, school principals, and community library founders), supplemented by short interviews with library users, participant observation at the regional library, school libraries, village libraries, and community reading centers, and analysis of planning and performance documents collected in 2024–2025. Data were analyzed through iterative thematic coding. Five interlocking dimensions of capacity emerged: leadership, organizational, human resource, service innovation, and collaborative governance. Leadership proved decisive: where village heads and managers framed the library as a development investment, modest facilities produced active services; where leadership was weak, adequate infrastructure stagnated. Capacity was also asymmetric, with a well-equipped regional library, under-resourced school libraries, adaptive village libraries, and community libraries sustained by social capital. We argue that library transformation is leadership-driven institutional work rather than technical upgrading, and propose a differentiated capacity development framework for local governments that matches support to institutional type.